This is looking interesting: Genocidal Organ, apparently a sci-fi war film based around the premise of some nefarious figure able to inspire outbreaks of warlike tendencies amongst populations purely through the recitation of certain combinations of words. It is based on the work of Project Itoh, who died back in 2009 aged only 34 and who has had all of his novels posthumously filmed now by different anime studios - the previous two being Harmony and the steampunk alternate history take on a Frankenstein story The Empire of Corpses.

Sorry about yet another post on the 2008-9 Golgo 13 series, but I’ve now finished the second half of it. If the first 25 episodes were equal parts showing just how much of a “world class super sniper!” Golgo 13 is, and then how he’s almost an angel of death figure, the final 25 episodes start to play around with the material in really interesting ways, that all interrelate with each other:

World issues
There are a lot of amusing allusions to ‘real world’ issues getting thrown into the whole series. They’re broad (especially the one in which “Robert Crump”, the megalomaniac, wager-prone owner of lots of New York real estate, including “Crump Tower”, has to be assassinated Lincoln-style whilst watching the rehearsal of a play! But there’s that fantastic final shot of that episode where “Crump Tower” still forlornly dominates the city skyline, its owner now gone), but they often help to sketch in the parameters of the situation as quickly as possible before the episode moves on to just how the assassination will be carried out (always keep a boiling hot pot of fondue to hand to dispose your hand assembled gun into!). There are allusions to drugs in cycling, and a rather bizarre episode that reolves around Hollywood studio executives trying to assassinate the upstart stars of Asian action films to protect their own market! (Which was perhaps a more relevant fear around the mid 90s to mid -2000s, but I digress!)

Women issues
Golgo 13 isn’t really healthy for women to become infatuated with! I’ve already mentioned in the previous post the great episode "Catherine the Cold-Blooded" with the “Real IRA”-styled internecine fighting between two women (one of whom was once Golgo 13’s lover and had a child by him, who died). That’s still the best of the ‘relationship’ episodes, especially as it’s the early sign that even with a past relationship Golgo 13 doesn’t really let that sway him – he’s only turned up again to assassinate the other woman in the conflict and the best way to do that is to tag along with his old flame. Her life, or death, is unimportant. But it does provide the answer of how to reach the target.

In the second half of the series there are many more lovelorn women scattered throughout the episodes. Some of the female characters couldn't be called particularly 'progressive', though some of the more iffy moments have at least a bit of nuance to them, especially in a couple of episodes where women attempt to use their bodies as bargaining tools (particularly in the ‘assassination of the prize-winning racehorse’ episode, where it’s the only thing that the daughter desperate to save her horse can offer as payment. But it awkwardly doesn’t work its magic and she just has to get dressed again!), but with Golgo 13 himself being such a blank the plight of the female characters are always more prominent, if tragic and doomed!

There’s an episode with the woman who accidentally killed someone and then just keeps running into Golgo 13 (in a bar, sharing a car to the airport and next to each other on the plane, which ends up crash landing). She’s mired in guilt, finds Golgo 13 has a moment of happiness and then follows him to witness his assassination and accepts being killed for having done so, with Golgo 13 leaving her dying on the ground. That also makes an interesting pairing with the ‘amnesia episode’ that I’ll talk about later.

Late in the series another lady with a child by Golgo 13 turns up – a prostitute who just ‘wanted a child’ and it was just chance that Golgo 13 was the father (although repeating this theme does make me wonder if he's ever heard of condoms!). Unfortunately she’s the current flame of a doppelganger assassin in that particular episode, and once the connection is discovered she and her child are used as hostages. But unfortunately that would only work if Golgo 13 cared about what happened to them! (That’s one of the closest episodes to entirely damning Golgo 13, if he wasn’t damned enough already, especially when he runs off without a word as soon as he finds out about the child! Though I guess he is being tailed at the time by a gangster too! Maybe its another element of the ‘body issues’ causing the most trouble that keeps coming up during the latter half of the series that I’ll talk about more later on).

And then there are the women who don’t have that intimate a relationship with Golgo 13 himself but have their men killed by him. Such as the girl roped into stealing an armoured car and fleeing with her criminal lover (he doesn’t make it), or the girl running an inn in the middle of the desert whose sympathetic but naïve brother returns from a heist with the money to make their lives a success (he doesn’t make it either, leaving sister and their blind mother to mourn him). There are a couple more that I’ll mention at the end.

So all the relationships are rather tragic and even if Golgo 13 isn’t directly involved in them just being in his orbit enough to appear in the show has already doomed one or both members of a couple!

(It probably goes without saying that this isn't exactly a feminist show, though really anyone who comes into Golgo 13's orbit isn't going to have a good time! Whilst a couple of episodes throw in some gratuitous nudity and sex scenes that are more or less necessary (the sex scene in the amnesia and Real IRA episodes are the only times that really works plot-wise), bizarrely the most explicit sexual content turns up in the opening and end credits sequences! Which means that it gets repeated dozens of times!)

The backgrounding and foregrounding of the ‘assassination of the week’

One thing this second half of the series does in a couple of episodes is to start marginalising the actual assassination itself. Sometimes it is completed at the start of the episode before the main credits! (As it is in the episode where Golgo 13 is escaping from his recent successful mission before a stray bullet hits his aircraft and forces him to crash land on an island in its own final stages of a Most Dangerous Game/Battle Royale/Predators-style fight between criminals from across the world against a new prototype battle armour suit! Will Golgo 13 succeed in bringing down the latest in weapon technology where fifty international terrorists failed? Of course he will, but not before the American general in charge of the operation makes a statement about the need for American imperialism! Before he gets shot in the head!).

At other times Golgo 13 is waylaid by other issues for the longest period and it looks as if the assassination may not occur at all (the amnesia episode being the main one. But also the final episode of the whole series in which Golgo 13 gets in a car crash immediately after accepting a contract and has to get a doctor to perform surgery on his right arm to get him back in working order), but eventually Golgo 13 cuts through all of those convolutions and emotional complications, often with a single bullet to the head!

I talked about it in the Hannibal thread too, but this is another series that takes the often problematic and futile feeling issue with television that everything has to go back to the status quo at the end of an episode and finds a way of making that work. It is as if Golgo 13 is constantly resetting everything to a zero sum state. Nothing is carried forward except the blank character himself (and the gunsmith, though he appears so infrequently and is relatively minor in the bigger scheme of things. Only as important to Golgo 13 in providing the means to complete his various assignments, and perhaps on the same level of utility as the ubiquitous airplanes Golgo 13 uses to jet around the world), and the series fully embraces this with every episode being standalone from any other. I was worried in the previous post that there would be an attempt to do a bigger story or attempt to wrap the series up, but nothing of the sort gets attempted and the series ends in the perfect way, with catching yet another taxi to the airport!

Money issues
The second half of the series plays around with money in interesting ways. In the first half of the series it gets made clear that Golgo 13’s price for every contract is $3 million in a Swiss bank account. At around the halfway point there are a string of episodes where at first it seems as if Golgo 13 is being ‘altruistic’ by accepting a job for less than his usual fee, such as the ‘Real IRA’ one or the episode "Murderous Crosspoints" where he is ‘cruised’ in a gym by a male admirer who wants to contract him out for a few hundred thousand dollars. In those episodes it becomes apparent after a while that Golgo 13’s actually been contracted out legitimately by other parties, and playing along with those who think that they’ve bought his services at cut price is the easiest way to carry out his goal. In that episode its all about delivering the ambitiously arrogant upstart to the boss he wanted to assassinate and having him, not killed, but reduced into having to be a slave to his boss. At least until the even more menial employee that the arrogant guy upset blows everyone up in retribution! (echoes within echoes down the hierarchy) And that’s something that briefly jars Golgo 13 too, seeing someone acting impulsively and emotionally to kill someone else, not for a practical purpose but just to dance in glee over revenge for some slight. At least until Golgo 13 shoots them!

There’s the race horse assassination episode "Law of the Pedigree" where the person trying to protect their horse (against the wishes of her father trying to kill it!) offers a fraction of the money, and her body, to call the contract off. But it doesn’t work, and neither does her attempt to use her own hunting skills to try and snipe Golgo 13 first during the race. Instead horse and rider end up dying within moments of each other.

Then there’s the episode in which Golgo 13 gets aggressively headhunted by someone who wants to force him to work as his personal bodyguard, which would also prevent Golgo 13 from accepting a contract to kill him instead! They do this by trying to buy him out and when that fails simply freezing all of Golgo 13’s assets, though leaving him just enough to complete his last ‘freelance’ contract. Which gives just enough opportunity to take up the contract from the opposition instead!

As with the issues over romance and children, characters are trying to use money to leverage Golgo 13 into doing their bidding. But they still don’t seem to realise that these things have no particular sentimental hold over him, so the potential loss of attachments, relationship-wise or monetary, don’t have the same impact on the character. And can even work to bring about a greater (or at least sooner!) tragedy than would have naturally occurred!

Body issues
This is the most interesting part of the second half of the series, as while it has been shown over and over that Golgo 13 cannot really be touched or harmed by external threats, what happens when the threat comes from within. When the machine of the body kept at its physical peak breaks down or is injured.

There’s the threat of physical deterioration, as in the amazing episode "One in 36,000 Seconds" entirely involving Golgo 13 having to stay motionless for multiple hours in order to await the perfect conjunction of two opening doors and the appearance of a target at the window of his jail cell. He takes illegal muscle relaxants (from a shifty cycling coach!) to lie there almost motionless and the entire episode is told from that position, fingers involuntarily twitching and it seeming that he will be unable to fire his gun. Until the alternative method of shooting gets revealed! (The shooting itself is an amazing moment of light and space that takes the episode into the territory of something like the conjunction of planet, spaceship and monolith at the beginning of the stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or the creation of the eye at the opening of Under The Skin. It is so spectacular that I can overlook that it seems unlikely that a jail would have a revolving metal door that spins on one central fulcrum point!)

But can he come back from that point? The coda of that episode involves Golgo 13 in a weakened state having to take on the cycling coach when he inevitably gets betrayed. That gets shown in an great sequence of Golgo 13 standing up and reaching for his gun in spasmodic, stuttering movements, as if he’s done irreparable damage to himself to carry out this job. He hasn’t and is physically fine next episode, but its quite a daring thing to push the body to such an extent (this episode pairs up well with the final one, in which Golgo 13 loses the use of his right arm in a car accident).

Then there is the potential mental fracture, shown through the classic ‘amnesia’ episode in which Golgo 13 gets caught in an explosion and forgets who he is. He is tended to by a (yet another) lonely woman who finds him fascinating and they try to solve the mystery of his identity Mulholland Drive-style. Golgo 13 doesn’t know who he is, but talks of his ‘body talking to him’ and urging him on, suggesting the sense that perhaps there doesn’t need to be a consciousness (let alone a moral one) behind the eyes any more when the physical body knows exactly what it needs to do in every situation.

Together they fight off threats. The woman can more than ably defend herself against goons, though the telling difference between them, and a sign of Golgo 13’s memory returning, is that while she can fight she cannot take having killed a man for the first time in her life, whilst he can. Then they escape to a cave and make love, which is the single time in the series in which Golgo 13 does anything more than just lie there impassively like a block of wood whilst the lady moans in orgasmic delight on top of him. In this case during the love scene he returns her kiss and closes his hand in hers. But its also the inevitable end of the relationship as Golgo 13’s memory returns and it turns out that he’s just been following the series of clues to his assassination target by following the trail of his preparations (the car, the gun, the cave perfectly overlooking the military ceremony). He carries out the job and while the woman says that she is fine to be killed for having witnessed him carry out his assassination (as had the woman in the episode earlier in the series), Golgo 13 is spared having to kill her by one of the soldiers gunning for him shooting her instead.

Unacknowledged issues
Won’t Golgo 13 run out of targets at some point? What if he ends up ravaging the criminal/political/business world of all of its low lifes? (Tinpot dictators and generals; shifty political figures with skeletons in their closets; mafia clans of various districts (apparently including L.A.!); local crime bosses; petty criminals, etc. Professional and amateur alike all meeting their end if someone has paid to take them out). Who will be left with petty feuds and $3 million burning a hole in their pockets to hire him?

Everyone seems to know who he is and how to contact him. Golgo 13 has been targeted a couple of times in various episodes but there never seems to have been a co-ordinated attempt to eliminate him by all of these forces banding together, which would seem to be the only way to even slightly have a chance against him!

Twelve recommended episodes
I really enjoyed all of the run of episodes from 20-45 or so (the last five tail off a little and start repeating themes covered more successfully earlier on, though the final episode of the series is great), but I thought that I'd add a list of the episodes that I particularly enjoyed:

"One In 36,000 Seconds"(Episode 45). The prison assassination with the revolving door and the wait for everything to come into alignment, whatever the toll it takes on the body.

"Air on a G-string" (Episode 7), which involves a violinist who had a string of his instrument break on him during a performance leaving him humiliated and with performance anxiety issues. He then gets replaced by his 'great Russian rival' to perform at a charity concert and hires Golgo 13 shoot out the string of his rival's violin and cause him similar humiliation. Amusingly Golgo 13 carries out this task perfectly but the rival just collects himself and continues on as best he can, rather than running off! So Golgo 13 fulfils his task but the man who hired him doesn't get the result he wanted! It's an early sign in the series of trying to throw in something other than just assassinations, whilst still retaining that moral tale aspect, and makes a good companion piece to the French wine connoisseur episode later on! (Episode 33)

"Fearless" (Episode 27), whose title might be an ironic allusion to the Peter Weir film. That involves a people who have miraculously escaped near death experiences (plane crashes, etc) and having been so traumatised by their survival into not knowing any fear, getting kidnapped by a cult as perfect candidates for brain washing and usage as assassins, with their next target being Golgo 13 himself. That makes a good companion to the earlier cult episode "The Saint That Reeks of Death" (Episode 16), that also involves Golgo 13 decimating an entire sect and its fanatical leader.

The episode "Love Moans on an Arctic Night" (Episode 28) about a woman who accidentally killed someone and then just keeps running into Golgo 13 (in a bar, sharing a car to the airport and next to each other on the plane, which ends up crash landing). She’s mired in guilt, finds Golgo 13, has a moment of happiness and then follows him to witness his assassination and accepts being killed for having done so, with Golgo 13 leaving her dying on the ground. / The amnesia episode "The Lost Assignment" (Episode 43), with another unfortunate meeting between a woman and our 'hero'.

"Melancholy Summer" (Episode 20) - the episode involving a lady left as a pariah on a Greek island waiting for her husband to return to her, unaware that he was just using her to escape the country. Or was he?

"A Great Day For Ash" (Episode 39): the most amusing and ingenious way of reaching an assassination target! (And a satire of terrible avant-garde artists, and their landlords, that's up there with A Bucket of Blood!)

Some of the older titles brushed past in the video are worth noting:
98: Macross: Do You Remember Love? (1984)
94: Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984). Directed by Mamoru Oshii, later director of the Ghost In The Shell features, and based on the long running manga series by Rumiko Takahashi (who is also notable for the Maison Ikkoku and Ranma ½ series)
90: Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990)
86: Armored Trooper Votoms (1983)
79: Urusei Yatsura (1981)
75: Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato (aka Arrivederci Yamato) (1978)
65: The first season of the long running Yu Yu Hakusho series (1992)
60: The first season of Sailor Moon (1992)
59: Castle In The Sky (1986)
54: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
44: Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)
39: Future Boy Conan (1978) a very early Hayao Miyazaki TV series
38: Hoshi no Ko Poron (1974)
29: The original Space Battleship Yamato series (1974)
24: Case Closed (aka Detective Conan) (1996)
17: The original Mobile Suit Gundam series (1979)
13: Legend of the Galactic Heroes (1988) - up there vying with Macross and Gundam for title of 'best space opera' series!

Its interesting that all the Hayao Miyazaki titles mentioned in the list are very early in his career. Spirited Away turns up as an also-ran on the list below of just female contributors, but other than that there is nothing from the mid 80s on.
___

Interestingly the main site has the 'overall list' (the one discussed in the video and the ranking above), and then there is a separate 'male' and 'female' voters list! In the male list Mobile Suit Gundam and Neon Genesis Evangelion break into the top ten, Macross: Do You Remember Love is at 48 and there are appearances from:

It looks as if the female contributors list is generally weighted towards more recent titles (though even the original Mobile Suit Gundam series turns up at 65! And Future Boy Conan, Space Battleship Yamato and Urusei Yatsura feature fairly prominently on both) and perhaps surprisingly features more sports-related titles such as Inazuma Eleven and Ace of Diamond (both about baseball, at 98 and 99). Perhaps its seeing handsome young guys playing with each other that provides the draw! Or at least might explain why the all male swim team series Free! is at number 17 on the list!

From a formal standpoint, I think The Professional: Golgo 13 is still the most purely entertaining adaptation out of all the films, OVAs and TV series to come out of the Golgo 13 franchise, but it also strays from the spirit of the manga more in that the manga has a very meat and potatoes formulaic feel. In this sense, the 08-09 TV series is probably the most faithful to the manga, even down to the fairly pedestrian animation and art (the manga occasionally has interesting visual flourishes, but for the most part it is as unflashy a manga series as you'd find on the newsstands).

Heh. Who says the Japanese lack irony? As noted on the wiki page, Chargeman Ken! was resurrected a number of years ago on Japanese social media as an example of an unintentionally hilarious "bad" old anime. Western anime fans caught wind of this and Chargeman Ken! has become something of a meme show for Western anime fans in recent years as well. Clearly its inclusion on ANY "top" list stems mostly from its reputation in recent years on social media.

I still have the recent Blu-ray edition of The Professional: Golgo 13 in my to watch pile, so hopefully I'll get to it soon. The thing that struck me about the 2008-9 series was the way that it didn't really seem to click for me until at least fifteen episodes in, and there's something about seeing fifty iterations on the same kind of material that became quite powerful, perhaps putting the viewer into the mindset of a professional killer continually moving from one set of characters and location from week to week, everyone else getting wiped away with the end credits! Even those two or three repeated music cues during the episodes emphasised that interchangeable nature of things (After 25 iterations of each I think that I can karaoke-sing along with both of the opening credits sequences now! And I love the constant jazzy musical sting that opens each 'coming up on the next episode' trailer!), and its perhaps that cumulative nature building throughout all of the episodes of the series that provides the unique perspective there. It doesn't iterate much on the basic template, but that seems to be key to the whole point of the show too.

Very disappointed to see a lack of love for Your Name on here. I saw it for the third time last week, on this occasion in IMAX. It's one of my favourite films of the last few years, admittedly partly for personal reasons, but I still find it a stunning achievement. It's a genre film, being firmly rooted in Young Adult/Teen convention, and should be read as such, rather than purely as 'anime', and the Ghibli comparisons don't really work for me.

Maybe it's because I'm in my late 20s, but I love the film's central premise that as you get older, the autumnal romance of teenage years fades like a dream does after you open your eyes. The way the film relates this to place and environment, and city/rural dynamics, may not be original but is both intellectually convincing and emotive.

I think the accessibility of the film is a bonus, and comparisons to Titanic are cruel. The film may 'take you on a ride' on a surface level, but the wider implications of the dream scenario and the Japanese cultural implications of natural disaster and mass destruction are like nails which press against the fabric of the narrative.

If we have to compare it to Ghibli, I'd say that Your Name is much more like the films of the underrated Isao Takahata, rather than Miyazaki. Specifically Only Yesterday.

StevenJ0001 wrote:
However, I don't see much similarity between Your Name and Only Yesterday (and although I enjoyed the former, I think the latter is a flat-out masterpiece). How did you find them to be similar?

I may be slightly off the mark as I've only seen Only Yesterday once, but it was the urban/rural dichotomy and the way it intersects with memory, depictions of youth and that very Japanese sense of time passing which really brings Only Yesterday and Your Name close together. I really enjoyed Only Yesterday when I saw it, but I felt it was a little too much of a traditional drama, too literal at times, whereas Your Name uses the tropes of teen drama to explore a melancholy which only an adult could really relate to, which is more thematically ambitious, IMO.

On the topic of new anime in general, has there been any discussion of In This Corner Of The World and A Silent Voice on here? A used the search function but couldn't find anything. I saw both when they were in the cinema and really enjoyed them.

Your Name - I was swayed by the hype surrounding this megahit but wasn't impressed by the film. While the art within the film is quite captivating, the story left a lot to be desired. The first act starts rather clumsily, with the opening credits played over a montage of scenes from later in the film. This took me a bit of time to get over since it seemed to want to capture the structure of an anime series early on, even fading to black about a half-hour in as if it was the end of the first episode. The film thankfully abandons this structure soon after.

For a film that is essentially a gender swapped Freaky Friday with high school students substituted in for parent and child, it spends very little time exploring this. There's a running joke about the boy groping himself once he's within the girl's body which came off as very creepy to me. But outside of that, some awkward conversations, and the boy going on a date set up by his possessed self, the film abandons exploring this thread to throw in a time travel twist!

SpoilerShow

The girl has actually been dead for three years due to a meteorite strike that killed 500 people in a small rural town, which the boy doesn't discover until he travels to her town and finds it's only a massive crater(!!!). I spent the rest of the film wondering how is it that a three year-old meteorite strike that killed hundreds of people could be completely unknown to someone who's roughly 16 or 17 and lives in a country as small as Japan. Anyway, the boy possesses the girl and tries to save the townspeople from being killed.

The film goes off the rails at that point, and I wasn't too invested in it after finding the identity changing was used as a hackneyed way to shoehorn in something about time travel. Very disappointing overall, but it was nice to look at.

Utena is a girl that chose to dress as a man as she was once saved of drowning by a prince, and she honors his memory that way. He gave her a ring with a rose ornament. But in the school she goes to, only the elite wears this ring, and they often duel to gain the services of shy girl Anthy. There are two ways to watch it : as an entertaining show with crazy characters or as an analysis of the passage from teen age to adulthood.

Bubblegum Crisis (8 OAVs and prequels / sequels)

4 women wear exoskeletons to prevent rogue robots produced by a megacorporation from endangering humans. The city and world are very inspired by Blade Runner (including some characters like Priss), action if efficient bur character development is very good too.

Rideback (12 episodes)

A female ballet dancer breaks her ankle beyond repair and meets a young man that works on a hybrid of robot and bike. She finds herself living again when she pilots it, but understands that she's now into a revolutionary movement.

Dagger of Kamui (movie)

A Japanese orphan is raised by a retired ninja, but his past condemns him to become a real ninja and discover his family past.

Escaflowne (26 episodes)

Hitomi is a teenage athlete that has visions of another world during a training session. Soon after a column of light appears and a young man, Van, appears followed by a dragon he fights and kills, removing a strange gem in his belly. They are sent in the fantasy world of Gaea, where he will use a giant robot/armor to fight an invading technological empire.

4 women wear exoskeletons to prevent rogue robots produced by a megacorporation from endangering humans. The city and world are very inspired by Blade Runner (including some characters like Priss), action is efficient but character development is very good too.

I only watched a couple of episodes of this over two decades ago but the one thing that made a lasting impression on me from the episodes I did watch was a small moment in which one of the characters wakes up in the morning and her computer downloads and prints out a copy of her morning paper within seconds! Even now that strikes me as much more futuristically exciting than just sitting down at the computer and clicking through a news site! Even if a printed copy is of course much worse for the environment! (Though I think there was also a machine that recycled and pulped yesterday's paper too!)

Speaking of female led series, the mention of Bubblegum Crisis reminded me that I got diverted away from that show by Gunsmith Cats, which might be the next series from the 1990s that I want to track down and revisit. I seem to remember thinking of it as being a kind of anime Cagney & Lacey at the time (though more in its portrait of female friendship through the medium of beating bad guys, with its bounty hunter protagonists), and its always interesting to see a Japanese view of America and its obsession with guns! (I've also got the jawdroppingly bad taste, funhouse mirror-anime version of the Lethal Weapon series, Mad Bull 34, to tackle at some point too!)

Last edited by colinr0380 on Wed Jan 17, 2018 4:06 am, edited 1 time in total.

Does anyone know of any scuttlebutt re Satoshi Kon's work getting re-releases, reprints, or anything at all? Finding it is darned expensive (at least with English subs, which I sadly need).

I have Perfect Blue and Paprika. I've considered buying a everything else while I am in Taipei and just watching without understanding the dialogue as these releases have no subs. It might be worth it.

The new Franco-Danish "anime" The Way North is absolutely gorgeous (despite a simpler style than found in Ghibli films). Although the Blu-Ray comes with an English version, the French voice tracks were recorded before the animation work -- so I'd say it is pretty intrinsic (and it is quite good -- but the English subs are "hard of hearing" ones). This seems to be the work of a new team -- so it will be interesting to see what they do next.

Gangsta. is an really interesting 12 episode series, though unfortunately the last from Manglobe studio (previously behind the Ergo Proxy series and the Genocidal Organ film) before they closed, so there sadly seems to be no chance of there being a second one! It has a relatively conventional plot but I found the way that it is told to be very entertaining. It is difficult to explain but it is sort of done in a ‘retroactive’ manner, in the more classical way through (the single, although shared between two of the lead characters) flashback, but also in the present day character development too. It is a standard technique but it is done so confidently and consistently here that it felt exhilarating to watch. This applies to everything from characters to world in which they live (which initially just seems a barely sketched in crowded city, but comes to get a name “Ergastulum” and a vague Attack on Titan-esque fantasy European feel), and the series feels confident in constantly asking the viewer to see the whole situation in a different light with every new piece of information. I get the impression that on re-viewing this series becomes something entirely different than it was on its initial viewing!

What seems to be a show about a couple of thuggish gangsters and the woman they save from abuse does not exactly deviate from that, but becomes a lot bigger in scope and tackles privilege versus servitude (and outright slavery/prostitution. Really ‘bondage’ in the classical sense of the word) head on.

We are first introduced to what just seems to be a couple of young thugs, lone gangsters operating outside the law – one has an eyepatch (Worwick) and the other doesn’t speak much (Nicolas) – as they go about their business and get a job from the police to wipe out a violent pimp and his gang. Which is where they get find (or appropriate!) their love interest from, the perhaps too pointedly named Ally (or Alex), who the pair know from having seen her using the alley outside their office for her ‘work’, and being beaten by her pimp. The first couple of episodes could put viewers off the show entirely, as it is very focused on violence against women, the toll of prostitution and Alex’s ongoing trauma from her abuse. Nicolas and Worwick kill the pimp, but instead of going on to complete their task by killing everyone associated with him, including the girl that works for him, they ‘claim’ her instead. This straight away throws up a lot of questions about motivation – would they have killed the pimp if not given orders to by the cops (who will also get rid of the bodies). Likely not, since we get the impression later on through the dialogue that both Nicolas and Worwick and Alex have been aware of each other for some time (the episode starts with them watching her being beaten through their window; Alex herself later says that she learnt a bit of sign language just from seeing them speaking together). Why have they taken her on? A shared sense of all having led hard lives? Compassion? Pity? Just the need for a new secretary? (which immediately drops away as the pretext it always was) Love Interest? If so, love interest for one guy or the other? Or both? What is Alex’s status within the group, especially given that the mid-point of the series reframes the relationship between the two guys quite drastically. Is she a pet of a pet? Its all troubling but interestingly complex (and I’m actually very glad that I never got any concrete answers to any of this!), and like every character, her role gets recontextualised with each new piece of information.

Perhaps the best place to focus on this ‘retroactive recontextualisation’ is on Nicolas, though this spoils a few of the twists over the course of the episodes

SpoilerShow

He starts off as the partner with Worwick, though a bit quieter. He is a better fighter and is seemingly the brawn against Worwick’s more garrulous type. Then it is revealed he is deaf and apparently cannot speak, which perhaps heightened his senses. Then that he can speak but only when he wishes to certain people.

After this there is the next big leap of Nicolas being a “Tag” due to his dog tags, suggesting a military background, though most people seem to hate and fear “tags”, perhaps for just their combat skills, but then in revealing that all of the dog tagged skilled fighters are members of a serf class called the “Twilights” it turns into a comment on class barriers, child soldiers, slavery and potentially these “Twilights” being a new evolution of humanity that is either created or suppressed by drugs. Either way there is a dependence built up that keeps ‘tags’ on a strict leash. They even have three laws they must abide by or face severe punishment that are very like Asimov’s three laws of robotics!

That reframes Worwick and Nicolas’s relationship quite drastically from a partnership between a slick ladies man and taciturn killer into a master-servant one and from this point the (interweaving) flashbacks begin to show how they met as children and the shared upbringing together, with Nicholas being the son of a prominent member of one of the ruling clans of this European-styled, Attack on Titan-esque city, but a child barely legitimised and gossiped about by the servants, due to being born after an affair his father had. His father keeps him around, but seemingly only to beat him and while they get Worwick a bodyguard, they provide him with the ‘damaged’ deaf son of one of their generals, who himself is getting abused by his father for being a Twilight (and abandoned as a ‘monster’ for already being too ill and dependent on injections to fight properly). So we get this tentative relationship between the two boys and what they shared with each other (illicit offspring of dead mothers that their fathers did not care about, or care about less than the women that bore them), though Worwick is interestingly ambivalent in the way that he both feels compassion for Nicolas (he is the one who educates Nicholas in his library, teaches him the alphabet (Twilights are kept illiterate apparently) and on finding a book of sign language learns it with him so that they can communicate better, all things that are unwittingly on Worwick’s part exploding the ideas of the Twilights being less than human and only useful for their expendable roles in frontlines of battles), but a sort of slave master’s compassion, occasionally enjoying his power, or chiding with a smile at his companion’s attempts at language. Which itself impacts on their adult relationship in the main narrative, as out of the world of privilege Worwick plays at master but Nicolas appears to be much more in his element. And it also affects Alex’s attempts at sign language to communicate with Nicolas better, making her both subordinate to the servant figure, but also providing him with a measure of respect that Worwick’s more casual taking for granted of their relationship does (and also the two ‘humans’ bookend the dog-tagged Twilight, with Alex being saved from an abusive life of prostitution set against Worwick supplementing his handyman job as a gigolo)

Then the most radical reframing happens at the end of the long string of flashbacks, as we learn how Worwick lost his eye (by his father burning it out with a lit cigarette during one of his beatings) and that in response Nicolas as his protector (and friend?) massacred the father and his entire family. Before on the verge of committing suicide for breaking one of the laws on not harming humans, Worwick stops him, but stops him because he wants him to suffer more by living on until he allows Nicolas to die. Which sheds light on the adult character’s relationship and Worwick’s relaxed attitude throughout earlier scenes of not seemingly caring if Nicolas lives or dies in his fights (which itself changes).

It is a brilliantly complicated and psychologically messy series with characters who refuse to ever be completely sympathetic (apart from the girl running the medical clinic, who seems emblematic of innocence) and sometimes entirely repulsive in their behaviours and treatment of others. Every action that occurs lets the audience see them in a different light. There seems to be a theme of degradation leading to a kind of dark liberation. When there are no other options left suddenly rock bottom provides a stable surface on which to rebuild. (The back story turns Worwick and Nicolas’s ‘outsider’ figures into kind of the key figures in the ongoing four-way gang war, as the fallen from grace son of an aristo and his faithful bodyguard who may be the true leaders-in-wating of Ergastulum. If they can avoid their outsider status causing them to become pariahs and targets of every faction in the meantime!)

Even in the final episodes of the series the characters are revealing new facets, such as the way that Nicolas has been our main representative of both “Tags” and “Twilights” in general, but in the last couple of episodes we see many other good “Tags” and families of “Twilights” to contrast Nicolas against. And also the fantastic revelation that the dog tags he wears with the rank of a high level fighter on them were stolen, and that is one of the main reasons why he has to keep overdosing on his drug, to sort of overclock himself into being able to perform beyond his natural abilities. All of those aspects undermine our sense of Nicolas that we had at the very opening of the show, but by that late stage we have come to understand him more deeply as a real character in his own right, so who cares that he isn’t the ‘ultimate of all ultimate’ fighters?

There is a fascinating method of parcelling out information to the audience going on throughout the series, even from the way that it seems that it initially seems as if it is going to be about standalone episodes for the first two or three, but then transforms into one ongoing narrative at the point of the first big conflict, a transformation which even reveals after the fact that the first three episodes were not just separate incidents to introduce the audience to the characters (though they serve that function too), but are tightly tied into the main plot. Set ups in one episode begin to have extra pay offs in the next; or flashbacks begun in one episode continue to develop and reframe across the next six. Or there are moments such as the cop casually mentioning how being in their 30s the two punks are not young anymore in one episode which gains more significance later, when it turns out that ‘Twilights’ rarely live into their 30s (though whether that is through illness or simply being abused and thrown into violent conflicts that there is little chance to survive is left open for future comment). Even something as small as Worwick smoking is something that comes to have its own powerful resonance behind it, revealed over the course of the show.

Plus I also like that a single piece of music often plays across multiple disparate scenes (even unabated over transitions between flashback and present day ones; or a scene involving one set of characters shifting to another) which adds a kind of interesting shared, dreamy quality to a number of the sequences, the music linking everything together in a grand swathe of soundscape, rather than picking out individual scenes or moments to emphasise. The most obvious example of that ‘classically’ happening is in the fantastic sequence in which Alex performing at the club is intercut with Worwick letting off the signal to gather together all of the various supporting characters we have been introduced to over the course of the episodes to come together to face the threat as one (it is sort of the ultimate version of sending out the Bat signal! But far better for happening unexpectedly). But sometimes music that began in one scene just washes over the next one, as if it is the emotional tone (the anger, the melancholy, etc) is continuing to drive the character’s actions into a new situation.

The one problem the series has is that it really climaxes with the attack on the club in episode 9, with the last three episodes focusing less on the main trio of characters than on the range of supporting characters who have just been introduced as having important roles to play in the wider society. It is another confident shift that has characterised the series up to this point, and the last three episodes serve to set up five or six different subplots that end on unresolved cliffhangers. But that makes one long for the second series that will never be, given the closure of the animation studio!

SpoilerShow

Alex’s brother gets introduced; will Nicolas go cold turkey on his drug habit or push himself even harder to overcome even stronger enemies?; is Worwick dead or paralysed from being hurled out of that window in the final moments of the last episode?

It does make me want to track down the manga now, which apparently has moved further on in the story (and I might be wrong on this but it was interesting to get the idea from the US dub actors in their commentary track over the first episode that when the anime was in production they actually came to the end of where the manga had reached at that point before the end of their series, so it seems that they had to spin their wheels a little Game of Thrones-style towards the end of the story), but at the same time I have been left more than satisfied with this single series to really need it to continue! I’ve rarely seen a series handle its character development as confidently and in such a sustained way as this one does. And I can only speculate that the series may have not been successful due to a bit of a misleading name and boisterous title sequence that might have led people to assume it was something quite different (Guy Ritchie-esque) than it actually is!

Last edited by colinr0380 on Sat Oct 20, 2018 3:30 pm, edited 2 times in total.

The anime film Fireworks has been licensed by GKIDS. It's animated by studio SHAFT, so this is pretty surprising. Almost all of their shows/movies go to Aniplex of America. They probably wouldn't have attempted to dub it, though, so there is a bit of merit to this GKIDS deal.

As expected, fans are really pissed off. It's only available on the Sentai Filmworks store, and payment is collected up front with no chance of an alternative plan for the $800 cost, either. Imagine waiting three years for this. Yikes.

As expected, fans are really pissed off. It's only available on the Sentai Filmworks store, and payment is collected up front with no chance of an alternative plan for the $800 cost, either. Imagine waiting three years for this. Yikes.

Also apparently (aside from the movies) the whole set is upscaled SD. What a joke.

I would love to get Legend of the Galactic Heroes on disc but I definitely do not have that kind of money all at once! Hopefully there might be a way to release it in more accessible chunks over time!

colinr0380 wrote:Speaking of female led series, the mention of Bubblegum Crisis reminded me that I got diverted away from that show by Gunsmith Cats, which might be the next series from the 1990s that I want to track down and revisit. I seem to remember thinking of it as being a kind of anime Cagney & Lacey at the time (though more in its portrait of female friendship through the medium of beating bad guys, with its bounty hunter protagonists), and its always interesting to see a Japanese view of America and its obsession with guns!

Apparently the recent anime series adapting a number of manga author Junji Ito’s short stories is not very good (to such an extent that it sounds better to avoid it and read the mangas instead), but on the more positive side this has inspired me to finally read Hellstar Remina, which is an astonishing piece of work, up there with Gyo in taking a initial subject and riffing on it elaborately until it becomes almost unrecognisable. What begins as a story of a girl, Remina, whose father names the new interdimensional planet he has discovered after her, leading to her getting hounded by fans and being ambivalent about her newfound, somewhat unearned celebrity goes off into ever vaster apocalyptic areas. And it all goes a bit When Worlds Collide, albeit with a far darker and bleaker edge to it that even that disaster film had! Yet throughout it still remains Remina’s story and a kind of ironic tale about the vicissitudes of fame and how one person can embody the hopes and fears of millions!

SpoilerShow

I especially love that whilst the events take place on a world (solar system) wide scale, to the extent of doing a round the world wind-powered jaunt across the globe at one point, that the action is confined to within a small group of Remina and the men surrounding her, almost as if they have been drawn into her orbit. Remina is often distressingly powerless in the face of the forces around her and is unable to do anything about any of the overwhelming events, from the human mobs to the planetary ending ones, except call out for the men in her life that she loved who sadly were the first to die. But then in her endurance she gains a kind of power (maybe that power though simply comes from the way that the work is focusing on her as its central character – the attention of the author on Remina is the only thing keeping the character alive), whilst all of the men similarly cannot change anything but run about panicking a lot more, and while they manage to provide Remina with once in a lifetime experiences that somehow make experiencing the end of the world worthwhile, the ‘happy ending’ (like Uzumaki’s) of tenuous survival is perhaps the worse end out of all of them!

I also like the way that the relationship between Remina herself and the planet Remina (which appears to be sentient, with its giant eyeball, mouth and tongue) is left ambivalent. Remina does not bear responsibility for the planet’s actions, yet there are a number of times when it seems as if the planet Remina ‘intercedes’ to save the girl, such as the ‘first contact’ of tongue with the Earth happening as Remina is being burnt at the stake (almost being triggered off by it), the force of which puts the flames out! Along with the ironic theme of fame, there is an interesting religious theme running throughout the manga too, with its theme of miraculous escapes and the sense that in a world driven to such extremes perhaps the only thing that can be done is hopefully wait for the next miraculous intervention that is sure to come along. There is a beautifully handled use of deus ex machina moments of constantly saving Remina from the current terrible fate only to (like Uzumaki) have delivered her into an even more existentially harrowing situation! Especially that incredibly bleak ending where it is really impossible to imagine of any way that the situation can continue! That is perhaps why in the end the girl and the planet are not entirely linked, as Remina is just as abandoned to die as everyone else. It is just unfortunate that at that terminal point there is nobody left alive who might have been swayed in their attitude towards the girl by seeing that!

I also kind of love that the setting here is a sci-fi futuristic one with flying cars and spaceships. Of course it is partly to set up the absolutely brilliant digressionary passage of a couple of characters taking a space shuttle to the planet Remina in a last ditch attempt to survive, and their experiences there, but I also think it is about showing a world far more technologically advanced than our own descending into anarchy at suddenly being faced with total annihilation. There is something quite unsettling (as well as darkly humourous) about even a futuristic society being shown to be powerless and collapsing than it would be if the setting was simply a contemporary one.

I should also emphasise that while a lot of the action is extremely gruelling, especially towards Remina herself, it is also a darkly funny read, full of amusing irony. It is really well written to have teasing set ups and pay offs for both characters and significant locations (it is obvious as soon as it is introduced early on in the first chapter that that padded luxury bomb shelter is going to have to have some purpose!), and the way that the whole story is written as a non-stop escalation of events from an already mindboggling opening is astonishingly impressive! It ends in an incredibly bleak way, yet in kind of a satisfying one as well where, in contrast to the cowards abandoning the planet (and getting their much deserved comeuppance!) Remina got to witness the end of the Earth in spectacular fashion!

It is like a apocalyptically twisted, black humoured version of Another Earth! And sort of makes Lars von Trier’s Melancholia seem like child’s play!